Being Subtle vs. Being Obvious

Gallant is about a quarter of the way finished. It’s over five thousand words long so far, which means that this story may unseat Dallas as the highest word count short story so far. Dallas was almost sixteen thousand words, and by definition, that makes it a novella, not a short story. However, in my haste to get some trusted opinions on the work done so far, I handed it off to my two roommates. One of them liked it, but the other had probelsm trying to identify a major plot point. As a writer, not properly expressing a major plot point is not necessarily considered to be good. In fact, that’s really bad. And when questioned, it turns out the other roommate did not get it either. I had to actually explain the point, and then suddenly it all made sense to them. Unfortunately, this has put something of a major dent in my writing, because now I’m perplexed on how to properly illustrate in a subtle fashion without giving it away or spelling it out for the reader. But it seems that I may actually have to write out exactly what happens so I don’t completely lose the reader, because if they don’t get it, they might as well stop reading altogether and move to someone else’s story.